Snake Eater

by William G. Tapply

  “What’ve we got?” said the other cop, a paunchy guy about fifteen years older.

  “Daniel McCloud has been killed. With a hunting arrow. He’s in there.” I jerked my thumb backward, indicating his shop.

  “McCloud, huh?” The cop shook his head. “Nice guy, McCloud. I usta buy bait from him.” He looked over my shoulder toward Cammie and Terri. “The black one’s his lady friend. Who’s the other one?”

  “She came with me.”

  “And you, Mr. Coyne?”

  “I’m Daniel’s lawyer. Cammie called me. She’s the one who found his body. I drove up from Boston.”

  “Boston, huh? What’s that, two hours on the pike?”

  “I made it in an hour-forty.”

  “How come she didn’t call us right away?”

  I shrugged. “I guess she was pretty upset. Confused, you know?”

  “She should’ve called right away.”

  “I know.”

  “She see anything?”

  “She says no.”

  “And you?”

  “I went in and looked at his body. He’s dead.”

  “Shot with an arrow, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” said the cop, “we’ll just sit tight until the detectives get here and try not to mess up the crime scene.”

  At that moment I heard another siren, and a moment later an unmarked sedan pulled in beside the cruiser. It was followed shortly by an ambulance, then a state police cruiser, then another unmarked sedan.

  For the next hour or so, state and local police, forensic experts, EMTs, photographers, and medical examiners swarmed around Daniel’s place. Cammie, Terri, and I each had our own detective to question us. Mine was Lieutenant Dominick Fusco, a tall swarthy guy with thick, curly iron-gray hair. He told me he knew my friend Horowitz, a state cop from the Boston area.

  I told Fusco that Daniel was both my client and my friend and I couldn’t think of anybody—aside, possibly, from Sergeant Oakley of the Wilson Falls Police Department—who didn’t like him. I said that I didn’t think the bait and tackle business was likely to create murderous competition.

  I also told him that Daniel used marijuana for medicine, and that his homegrown year’s supply had been confiscated by the police in July, although the case against Daniel had been dismissed. Fusco said he knew all about that, and the implication was clear. They’d be checking out all the local drug sources closely.

  Fusco told me that it looked as if Daniel’s killer had ransacked the little office in back of the shop. He asked me if that suggested anything to me. I said robbery, obviously. He said there was still money in the cash register and it didn’t look as if anything had been stolen from the shop.

  If it wasn’t robbery, then nothing suggested itself to me.

  Otherwise, Fusco didn’t tell me anything. And I didn’t have much to tell him, either.

  After a while the EMTs wheeled a stretcher out of the shop. A lumpy black bag was on the stretcher. It was loaded into the back of the ambulance, which then drove away. It didn’t bother to sound its siren.

  And, one by one, the various police cruisers and sedans pulled away. Fusco was the last to leave. He had taken notes as we talked. I had given him both my office and home phone numbers.

  He tucked his notebook into his jacket pocket. “We’ll be in touch, Mr. Coyne,” he said.

  “Anything I can do, let me know.”

  “You can count on it.”

  He turned to go to his car. I said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  He stopped. “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think he was shot with a bow.”

  Fusco smiled. “No?”

  “No. The angle of that arrow. Assuming he was standing up, to shoot him, you’d have to be lying on the floor.”

  “That’s pretty elementary, Mr. Coyne.”

  I shrugged. “Guess so.”

  “They didn’t shoot him,” he said. “Somebody rammed that arrow into him.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “He was standing there in front of him, or maybe beside him, and he grabbed that arrow with both hands and just shoved it in as hard as he could.”

  Fusco nodded. “Raises all kinds of questions, once you think of it that way, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “you have any further insights, or hypotheses, or questions, or anything, you be sure to let me know, okay?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  8

  WE WERE STILL STANDING there, a few minutes after the last official vehicle had left, when a banged-up old Ford pickup chugged to a stop in the driveway.

  “Oh, gee,” muttered Cammie.

  A vastly overweight black man climbed out the passenger side and a powerful-looking swarthy guy got out from behind the wheel. Cammie met them halfway. The three of them formed a huddle with their arms around each other’s shoulders. They leaned forward so that their foreheads appeared to be touching. I could hear the low rumble of the black man’s voice. It sounded as if he was praying.

  After a few minutes, they straightened up. Cammie took each man by the arm and led the two of them back toward where Terri and I stood.

  “Brady Coyne, Terri Fiori, this is Roscoe Pollard”—indicating the fat black man—“and Vinnie Colletti. Daniel’s dear friends.”

  I stepped forward and shook hands with each of them. Roscoe’s eyes were large and dark and damp. “Hello, brother,” he said softly in a deep bass voice.

  Vinnie, who was shaped like a linebacker, said nothing when we shook. His eyes refused to meet mine.

  Each of them nodded shyly at Terri.

  “I called Vinnie and Roscoe right before you got here,” Cammie said to me.

  “You should’ve called sooner, sister,” said Roscoe, who I took to be the spokesman for the two men. “We’re only twenty minutes away. You shouldn’t have been alone.”

  Cammie nodded. “I know. It was…I guess I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I called Brady right away, he said he was coming, and…” She shrugged.

  “You’re Daniel’s lawyer,” said Roscoe to me. Up close, I saw that he was fat like a sumo wrestler. All that flesh was composed of great mounds of muscle.

  “Yes,” I said to him. “His lawyer.”

  “You got him out of jail.”

  I shrugged and nodded.

  “Daniel talked about you. He liked you.”

  “I liked him, too.”

  He dipped his head in a kind of a bow. “Thank you for coming.”

  I nodded.

  “We got here as fast as we could,” he said to Cammie. “The, um, all the official vehicles were already here. We decided to wait till they left. No sense of confusing things.”

  Cammie smiled and nodded.

  Roscoe turned to me. “Me and Vinnie live up the road a ways. Turner’s Falls. We were with Daniel over there. We were family. We helped him build this.” He waved at the shop and the house. “We hung around with him. Shooting the shit in the shop. Fishing, hunting, catching bait.” He shook his head.

  I understood that Roscoe and Vinnie had chosen to wait for the police to leave before they made their appearance. Their motives, I figured, were their own business.

  “Let’s go up to the house,” said Cammie. “We’ll have coffee.”

  The five of us went up to the house. Cammie, with her arms around the massive backs of the two big men, looked like a child between them.

  We took coffee out onto the deck. Cammie sat staring dry-eyed off toward the river. It would take a while to sink in. Roscoe and Vinnie said little. Vinnie Colletti, in fact, had barely uttered a word since he arrived. Neither Terri nor I tried to disturb the somber mood. We all sat there with our own thoughts.

  Sometime later we heard the sound of a motorcycle moving fast toward the house. Cammie jumped up without speaking and walked quickly around to the front.

  Roscoe and Vinnie exchanged smiles. They remained on the deck.

  Te
rri and I followed behind Cammie. As we got there, we saw a helmeted man skid a big Harley to a stop in the driveway. He leaped off his bike, took off his helmet, and held out his arms to Cammie. She ran to him and hugged herself against him. He held her for a long time. They swayed back and forth, and it was hard to tell who was comforting whom.

  He was a tall, very thin man with a deeply creased face and a scraggly beard. He murmured into Cammie’s ear. I noticed that Cammie was crying against his shoulder.

  After several minutes the man lifted his head and noticed me and Terri. He whispered something to Cammie, who turned to look at us. Then she stepped out of his embrace, took his hand, and led him to us.

  “Brady Coyne, Terri Fiori, this is Brian. Brian Sweeney.”

  Sweeney held out his hand to me and we shook. He dipped his head shyly and murmured, “Mr. Coyne.” Then he turned to Terri and smiled. “Ma’am,” he said.

  “Brady is Daniel’s lawyer,” said Cammie. “And friend.”

  Sweeney nodded. “He’s mentioned you,” he said to me. He turned back to Cammie. “I came just as soon as I got your message. Sorry I wasn’t quicker.”

  “Brian lives in Vermont,” said Cammie. “He doesn’t have a phone. You have to call the general store.” She moved beside him and snaked her arm around his waist. “Brian is Daniel’s best friend in the world.”

  “What in hell happened?” he said.

  “Someone shoved a hunting arrow into his heart,” I said.

  “Jesus,” Sweeney muttered. “They know who?”

  “If they do they’re not saying.”

  “An arrow?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I saw it.”

  Up close, I could see that Sweeney was younger than I had at first thought. Early forties at the most, I guessed, about the same age as Roscoe and Vinnie. Barely twenty when he prowled the jungles of Indochina with Daniel. But already his hair was thinning and his skinny body was growing stooped and lines were etching themselves on his face. Under its ruddy sunbaked surface his skin seemed dull and sickly.

  He stared solemnly at me. “This is hard to believe,” he said. “I mean, Daniel? An arrow? Christ, there ain’t nobody—” I saw his Adam’s apple bob in his long throat, and then tears welled up in his eyes. “Ah, shit,” he said. He turned to Cammie and pulled her against him. “Ah, damn, anyhow,” he mumbled into her hair. “He was all we had,” he said to her. “Both of us.”

  “Roscoe and Vinnie are here,” Cammie told him.

  “Good,” said Sweeney.

  The four of us went back to the house. Sweeney exchanged complicated ritualistic handshakes with Roscoe and Vinnie and then gave each of them a bear hug. The three of them wandered down to the end of the deck, where they stood close together, murmuring.

  After a few minutes they came back. Tears glittered in Roscoe’s eyes.

  “You guys want sandwiches?” said Cammie.

  “Good idea,” said Sweeney.

  Cammie and Terri went inside. I sat down with the other three men and lit a cigarette. Sweeney took a Sucrets box from his shirt pocket, flipped its lid, and removed a prerolled cigarette. He held the box to Roscoe and Vinnie. They both shook their heads.

  Sweeney lit up, sucked in, and held it in his lungs. Then he sighed. “We were all there together,” he said to me, jerking his head at the other two men.

  “Vietnam?”

  He nodded.

  “All of you stayed close.”

  They all nodded.

  “It was Daniel,” said Roscoe softly. “He kept us together. That’s why we all ended up around here. To stick by Daniel.”

  “So who’d want to kill him?” I said.

  The three of them shrugged.

  “What about you?” said Sweeney to me. “Do you have any thoughts?”

  “You mean, who killed Daniel?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, he was worried that he was running out of his medicine.”

  “Yeah,” said Sweeney. “Me, too. Daniel kept both of us supplied.”

  “You—?”

  He nodded. “I got Oranged, too. We talked about it after they ripped up his garden. But Daniel wouldn’t deal with any supplier. I might,” he added with a sly grin, “but not Daniel.”

  “The only other thing I can think of, then,” I said, “is this local cop, this Sergeant Oakley, the one who arrested Daniel. Cammie suspects him, I think. But that seems pretty farfetched to me.”

  Sweeney shrugged. “Daniel was a lovable old bastard,” he said.

  I flashed back on Al Coleman’s words. Coleman had called Daniel crazy and dangerous. “You sure of that?” I said.

  The three of them all frowned at me. “What do you mean?” said Roscoe.

  “Somebody didn’t love him. Somebody killed him.”

  He shrugged. “Someone who didn’t know him, then.”

  “A burglar, maybe.”

  “Nah,” said Sweeney quickly. “No burglar would get the drop on him like that. Daniel was too quick and too careful for any burglar. Was anything stolen?”

  “I don’t think so. The office behind his shop was ransacked. But apparently nothing was taken.”

  Sweeney stared across the meadow. “I can do some checking around,” he said. He glanced at Roscoe and Vinnie. “We all can.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  He shrugged. “A man leads a team into the jungle…”

  “You should share your thoughts with the police,” I said. “You all should.”

  Sweeney turned to me. “I haven’t got any thoughts,” he said. “But I’m gonna check around anyway.”

  9

  LIEUTENANT FUSCO CALLED ME from Springfield a few days later. But I had no further insights for him. I realized that I hadn’t known Daniel McCloud that well. I had represented him when he was arrested, and I had tried to find an agent for his book.

  He was more than a client. Most of my clients are. I considered him a friend. But he was also a private man. He hadn’t shared his demons with me, though I suspected that any man who had lived through the things he had lived through must be haunted. Cammie, more candidly than Daniel, had suggested as much.

  Fusco had no insights, either, or at least none he chose to share with me. He did tell me that they had made no arrests, discovered no motive, identified no suspects. Cammie inventoried the shop for them, and they concluded that there had been no robbery. The office in the back had been messed up, but nothing appeared to be missing.

  The medical examiner, Fusco told me, determined that Daniel had died almost instantly when the broadhead sliced through his heart. There was no evidence, either at the crime scene or on Daniel’s body, of a struggle between him and his assailant. They had found no useful fingerprints or footprints or tire tracks, no stray human hairs or bits of skin, no scraps of fabric or lost buttons, no cigar ashes or cigarette butts. No witnesses. Nothing.

  Terri and I took turns talking with Cammie on the phone each day during the week following Daniel’s death. Roscoe Pollard and Vinnie Colletti, she told us, had left shortly after we did the day Daniel was killed. Brian Sweeney stayed a little longer, but then he, too, left. Daniel’s army buddies, she said, were a lot like Daniel. They didn’t like to stray far from home. But Sweeney, especially, was a comfort, and he called her every day, too, the way Terri and I did.

  The state police had interrogated her repeatedly. She had to tell them her entire life story, and Daniel’s, too, or what she knew of it. She gave them the names of everybody she could think of who knew Daniel—Roscoe Pollard and Vinnie Colletti and Brian Sweeney and his other “brothers” from Vietnam and the local guys who liked to hang around at the bait and tackle shop. She told me she thought they had arranged for a Vermont state police detective to talk with Sweeney, who was Daniel’s best friend and had known him longer and better than anybody, including herself.

  She had to tell them about how Daniel had rescued her from her Springfield pimp. That wasn’t easy, she said. She didn’t like t
he way the cops glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes or the exaggerated way they called her “Ma’am.” But they had to know about Boomer.

  She was okay, she told us. She said she guessed it still hadn’t really hit her yet.

  I figured the police regarded Cammie Russell as a suspect.

  The following Saturday, just a week after the murder, Terri and I spent the day with Cammie. The three of us walked through the woods and along the river that Daniel had loved. Cammie and Terri seemed to like each other, which made sense to me, since I liked both of them. They whispered between themselves, and a couple of times Cammie laughed. Later, I grilled steaks for the three of us while Cammie and Terri tossed a big salad, and we ate out on the deck while Daniel’s favorite Jimmy Reed tape played through the sliding screens. We had some wine and watched the sun sink over the river. Darkness settled into the woods and the night creatures came out. We put our heads back and looked at the stars. We switched to coffee.

  “As soon as they release his body,” said Cammie, “I’m going to give a party. I hope you both will come.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And then,” she said to me, “I’ll probably need to talk with a lawyer.”

  “Yes. I’ll help all I can.”

  She reached over and squeezed my arm. “I know. You already have.”

  It was midnight. Terri yawned. We took the coffee mugs inside. “Thanks a lot for coming,” said Cammie.

  “We can stay with you,” I said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  I arched my eyebrows doubtfully.

  She reached behind her back, then showed me the small automatic handgun that had materialized in her hand.

  “Ah,” I said. “You’re armed.”

  “Daniel insisted.”

  “When?”

  “Right from the beginning. I was afraid of Boomer coming for me. Daniel kept saying I shouldn’t worry, but I wasn’t very stable then. So he got this for me and showed me how to use it. I’ve never seen Boomer.” She shrugged. “But I’ve just kept it.”

  “I thought Daniel hated guns.”